Nightside the Long Sun (34 page)

“Uh-huh. That's about the only prayer I know—what they call her short litany. Will that be all right?”

Silk laid aside the stick and leaned toward Chenille, his decision made. “There is one more god to whom I wish you to pray—a very powerful one who may be able to help you, as well as Orchid and poor Orpine. He is called the Outsider. Do you know anything about him?”

She shook her head. “Except for Pas and Echidna, and the days and months, I don't even know their names.”

“Then you must open your heart to him tomorrow,” Silk told her, “praying as you've never prayed before. Praise him for his kindness toward me, and tell him how badly you—how badly all of us in this quarter need his help. If you do that, and your prayers are heartfelt and truthful, it won't matter what you say.”

“The Outsider. All right.”

“Now I'm going to shrive you, removing your guilt in the matter of Orpine's death and any other wrongs that you have done. Kneel here. You don't have to look at me.”

*   *   *

Half the abandoned manteion had been converted into a small theater. “The old Window's still back there,” Chenille explained, pointing. “It's the back of the stage, sort of, only we always keep a drop in front of it. There's four or five drops, I think. Anyhow, we go in back of the Window to towel off and powder, and there's a lot of hoses on the floor and hanging down back there.”

Silk was momentarily puzzled until he realized that the “hoses” were in actuality sacred cables. “I understand,” he said, “but what you describe could be dangerous. Has anyone been hurt?”

“A dell fell off the stage and broke her arm once, but she was pretty full.”

“The powers of Pas must indeed have departed from this place. And no wonder. Very well.” He put his bag and the triptych on seats. “Thank you, Chenille. You may go out now if you wish, although I would prefer that you remain to take part in the exorcism.”

“If you want me I'll stay, Patera. All right if I grab something to eat?”

“Certainly.”

He watched her go, then shut the door to the courtyard behind her. Her mention of food had reminded him not only that he had given the cheese he had intended for his lunch to the bird, but of his fried tomatoes. No doubt Chenille would go to the pastry shop across the street. He shrugged and opened his bag, resolved to divert his mind from food.

There seemed to be a kitchen in the house, however; if Blood had not yet eaten, it was quite possible that he would invite him to lunch when the exorcism had been concluded. How long had it been since he had sat beneath the fig tree, watching Maytera Rose consume fresh rolls? Several hours, surely, but he had failed to share his breakfast with her; he was justly punished.

“I will not eat,” he muttered to himself as he unpacked the glass lamps and the little flask of oil, “until someone invites me to a meal; then and only then shall I be free of this vow. Strong Sphigx, hardship is yours! Hear me now.”

Perhaps Orchid would wish to speak to him again about the arrangements for tomorrow; judging from her appearance (and thus, as he reminded himself, very possibly unfairly) Orchid ate often and well. She might easily fancy a bowl of grapes or a platter of peach fritters …

Largely to take his mind off food, he called, “Are you here, Mucor? Can you hear me?”

There was no reply.

“I know it was you, you see. You've been following me, as you said you would last night. I recognized your face in Teasel's father's face this morning. Was it you that drank her blood? This afternoon I saw your face again, in poor Orpine's.”

He waited but there was no whisper at his ear, no voice except his own echoing from the bare shiprock walls.

“Say something!”

A gravid silence filled the deserted manteion.

“That woman screaming in this house last night while I was outside in the floater—it was too apposite for mere chance. The devil was there because I was, and you're that devil, Mucor. I don't understand how you do the things you do, but I know it's you that do them.”

He had packed the glass lamps in rags. As he unwrapped one, he caught sight of what might almost have been Mucor's death's-head grin. Carrying a lamp in each hand, he limped to the stage to look more closely at the painted canvas—it was presumably what Chenille had called a drop—behind it.

The scene was a crude mockery of Campion's celebrated painting of Pas enthroned. As depicted here, Pas had two erections as well as two heads; he nursed one in each hand. Before him, worshipful humanity engaged in every perversion that Silk had ever heard of, and several that were entirely new to him. In the original painting, two of Pas's taluses, mighty machines of a peculiarly lovely butter yellow, were still at work upon the whorl, planting a sacred goldenshower in back of Pas's throne. Here the taluses were furnished with obscene war rams, while Pas's blossom-freighted holy tree had been replaced by a gigantic phallus. Overhead the vast, dim faces of the spiritual Pas leered and slavered.

After carefully setting the blue lamps on the edge of the stage, Silk extracted Hyacinth's azoth from beneath his tunic. He wanted to slash the hateful thing before him to ribbons, but to do so would certainly destroy whatever might remain of the Window behind it. He pressed the demon, and with one surgical stroke slit the top of the painted canvas from side to side. The detestable painting vanished with a thump, in a cloud of dust.

Blood came in while he was setting up his triptych in front of the blank, dark face of the Window. Votive lamps burned again before that abandoned Window now, their bright flames stabbing upward from the blue glass as straight as swords; thuribles lifted slender pale columns of sweet smoke from the four corners of the stage.

“What did you do that for?” Blood demanded.

Silk glanced up. “Do what?”

“Destroy the scenery.” Blood mounted the three steps at one side of the stage. “Don't you know what that stuff costs?”

“No,” Silk told him. “And I don't care. You're going to make a profit of thirteen thousand cards on my manteion. You can use a fraction of it to replace what I've destroyed, if you choose. I don't advise it.”

Blood kicked the pile of canvas. “None of the others did anything like this.”

“Nor were their exorcisms effective. Mine will be—or so I have reason to believe.” With the triptych centered between the lamps to his satisfaction, Silk turned to face Blood. “You are afflicted by devils, or one devil at least. I won't bother to explain just who that devil is now, but do you know how a place or a person—any person—falls into the power of devils?”

“Pah! I don't believe in them, Patera. No more than I do in your gods.”

“Are you serious?” Silk bent to retrieve the walking stick Blood had given him. “You said something of the sort yesterday morning, but you have a fine effigy of Scylla in front of your villa. I saw it.”

“It was there when I acquired the property. But if it hadn't been, I might have put up something like that anyway, I admit. I'm a loyal son of Viron, Patera, and I like to show it.” Blood stooped to examine the triptych. “Where's Pas?”

Silk pointed.

“That whirlwind? I thought he was an old man with two heads.”

“Any representation of a god is ultimately a lie,” Silk explained. “It may be a convenient lie, and it may even be a reverent one; but it's ultimately false. Great Pas might choose to appear as your old man, or as the spiraling storm which is his eldest representation. Neither image would be more nearly true than the other, or more true than any other—merely more appropriate.”

Blood straightened up. “You were going to tell me about devils.”

“But I won't, not at present at least. It would take some time, and you wouldn't believe me in any case. You've saved me a decidedly unwelcome walk, however. I want you to assemble every living person in this house in this theater. Yourself, Musk if he's come back, Crane, Orchid, Chenille, the bald man, all the young women, and anyone else who may be present. By the time you get them in here, I will have completed my preparations.”

Blood mopped his sweating face with a handkerchief. “I don't take orders from you, Patera.”

“Then I will tell you this much about devils.” Silk freed his imagination and felt it soar. “They are here, and one person has died already. Once they have tasted blood, they grow fond of it. I might add that it is by no means unusual to find them acting upon merely verbal resemblances, notions that you or I might consider only puns. It's apt to occur to them that if ordinary blood is good, the blood of Blood should be much better. You'd be wise to keep that in mind.”

*   *   *

The women arrived by twos and threes, curious and more or less willingly driven by Musk and the muscular bald man, whose name seemed to be Bass; soon they were joined by Loach and Moorgrass from Silk's own manteion, both frightened and very glad to see him. Eventually Crane and a dry-eyed, grim Orchid took seats in the last row. Silk waited for Blood, Bass, and Musk to join them before he began.

“Let me describe—”

His words were drowned by the chattering of the women.

“Quiet!” Orchid had risen. “Shut up, you sluts!”

“Let me describe,” Silk began again, “what has happened here and what we will be trying to accomplish. The entire whorl was originally under the protection of Great Pas, the Father of the Gods. Otherwise it could never have existed.”

He paused, studying the faces of the twenty-odd young women before him intently, and feeling rather as if he were addressing Maytera Mint's class in the palaestra. “Great Pas planned every part of it, and it was constructed by his slaves under his direction. In that way were the courses of all our rivers charted, and Lake Limna itself dug deep. In that way were the oldest trees planted, and the manteions through which we are to know him built. You are sitting, of course, in one such manteion. When the whorl was complete, Pas blessed it.”

Silk paused again, counting silently to three, as he so often had at the ambion, while he searched the faces of his audience for one that had come to resemble the mad girl's, however subtly. “Even if you're inclined to dispute what I've said, I require that you accept it for the present, for the sake of this exorcism. Is there anyone here who
cannot
accept it? If so, please stand.” He stared hard at Blood, but Blood did not rise.

“Very well,” Silk continued. “Please understand that it was not merely the whorl as a whole that received Pas's blessing and with it his protection. Each individual part received it as well, and most have it still.

“At times, however, and for good reasons, Pas withdraws his protection from certain parts of this whorl he created. It may be a tree, a field, an animal, a person, or even an entire city. In this instance, it is surely a building—the one we are in now, the one that has since become a part of this house, so that Pas's protection has departed from the entire house.”

He let that sink in while his eyes roved from face to face. All of Orchid's women were relatively young, and one or two were strikingly beautiful; many if not most were more than ordinarily good-looking. None resembled Mucor in the least.

“What, you may ask, does that mean? Does it mean that the tree dies or the city burns? No, it does not. Suppose that one of you owned a cat, one that bit and scratched you until at last, in disgust, you thrust your cat out into the street and shut your door. That cat, which once was yours, would not die—or at least, it would not die immediately. But when dogs attacked it, there would be no one to defend it, and any passerby who wished to stone it or lay claim to it could do so with impunity.

“So it is with those of us from whom Pas's blessing has been taken. Some of you, I know, have suffered possession here, and in a few moments I am going to ask one of you who has been possessed to describe it.”

A small dark woman at one end of the first row grinned, and though little in her face had changed, it seemed to Silk that he could see the skull that underlay it. He relaxed, and realized that his palms were running with sweat, that the carved handle of Blood's walking stick was slippery with it, his forehead beaded with perspiration that threatened to run into his eyes. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his robe.

“This object behind me was once a Sacred Window—I doubt that there is anyone present who is so ignorant that she does not know that. Through the Window that this once was, Lord Pas spoke to mankind. So it is with the gods, as every one of you must know—they speak to us by means of the Windows that Great Pas built for them and us. They have other ways as well, of course, of which augury is but one. That doesn't alter the fact that the Windows are the primary means. Is it any wonder, then, that when we permitted this one to fall into disrepair, Pas withdrew his blessing? I say we, because I include myself; we, every man and every woman in Viron, let this devilish thing happen.

“In preparation for this exorcism, I did everything that I could to repair your Window. I cleaned and tightened its connections, spliced and reconnected its broken cables, and attempted certain other more difficult repairs. As you see, I failed. Your Window remains lightless and lifeless. It remains closed to Pas, and we can only hope that he will take the will for the deed and restore his blessing to this house, as we pray.”

Several of the young women traced the sign of addition in the air.

Silk nodded approvingly, then looked straight at the dark woman. “Now I am going to speak directly to the devil who has come among us, for I know that it is here, and that it hears me.

“That very great god the Outsider has placed you in my power. You, also, have a window, as we both know. I can close it, and lock it against you, if I choose. Depart from this house forever, or I will so choose.” Silk struck the stage with Blood's stick.
“Be gone!”